Assessing Comprehension in a School Setting. Linguistics and Reading, Series: 3. Papers in Applied Linguistics.

Griffin, Peg, Ed.

This book is intended to help instructors construct reading tests. All the chapters are concerned with viewing two complementary aspects of the written text materials that is used as the base for testing: (1) the relations that hold among the parts of a written text that occur together; and (2) the fact that each word in a text plays certain roles in the language as a whole and is subject to certain restrictions on how it can be used in any text of the language. These two aspects of language are basic to modified cloze test building and modified miscue test building, the kinds of tests treated in the chapters in this book. The following topics are developed: (1) cloze testing and reading; (2) building a group test; (3) interpretation of test results; (4) teaching strategies related to a reading test; and (5) building an individual test. The appendices include a sample passage, samples of construction worksheets, and the passages used in constructing the sample cloze tests. A bibliography is included. (AMH)